Despite push-back from more than a dozen tea party activists, five Pinellas County commissioners said it was time to get moving on transit. At a meeting Tuesday in Clearwater, commissioners approved a 2014 ballot measure asking for an up to one cent sales tax increase to fund transportation. During a follow-up Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority board meeting Wednesday, transit officials started talking about how to allocate the money if voters approve the referendum.

As officials in Pinellas County gear up to expand transit options, Hillsborough County Commissioner Mark Sharpe has said he wants to start talking about funding some enhancements on his side of the Bay. The Tampa Bay Times reports Sharpe said he wants to start building support for a 2014 referendum. Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority CEO Brad Miller says thatâs a good thing.

âPSTA has worked very hard to try to develop our Alternative Analysis in a regional way and one of the cha...

Even though the idea of a cross-bay merger is off the table for now, the boards of the transit agencies in Pinellas and Hillsborough Counties still say they want to work on some projects together. After a state mandated merger study, the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority had requested the state fund a second study taking a deeper look into possible cost savings. HART filed a separate report requesting no further studies. During a Tampa Bay Area Regional Transportation Authority meeting, o...

Some transit officials want the Florida legislature to let localities increase their local gas tax as much as ten cents per gallon. A Sarasota planning official suggested several possible ways to boost revenue during the Tampa Bay Area Regional Transportation Authority meeting Friday in Tampa.

Michael Howe, executive director for the Sarasota/Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization is pushing for a 2-cent increase to local gas taxes every year for the next five ...

The Hillsborough Area Regional Transit authority is trying to make it easier for bus riders to figure out how to get from point A to point B. HART will launch a web-based bus information system for riders this summer. The program is called OneBusAway and was created with the help of USFâs Center for Urban Transportation Research. It will be available on smart phones, through the HART website and through telephone operators. HARTâs Information Technology Services coordinator, Shannon Ha...

Hillsborough Countyâs transit agency is looking at ways to revamp its system, mostly by improving services it already offers. At a workshop today, community stakeholders and HART officials laid out different funding options for new projects.

More and more people are ditching their wheels and hopping on buses. According to Jeff Seward, HARTâs chief financial officer, ridership is already up 3.5% over last year. That leaves a wide gap in bus service for the county that Seward said cou...

On Wednesday Pinellas transit officials unanimously approved plans to move forward with a transit overhaul by passing the issue to county commissioners. During three hours of public comment Michael Marino with the Tampa Bay Partnership said he met more than 100 times with people in the community about what their priorities were and the answer almost every time was improved transit.

"This is not a debate about taxes or trains. This is a debate about do you want to have a positive impact o...

Board members for the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, or PSTA will decide once and for all tomorrow whether or not to ask Pinellas County Commissioners to put a sales tax referendum on the November, 2014 ballot. As proposed, the measure would boost the countyâs sales tax from 7% to 8% and would fund a massive transit overhaul. The improvements would include better bus service and eventually light rail connecting downtown St. Pete t...

The Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authorityâs (PSTA) board is sticking to its guns about a recommendation to the Florida legislature that would further study the benefits of combining their agency with Hillsboroughâs. Both boards had decided to ask the state to pay for a second merger study, but last week, leaders of the Hillsborough transit authority rescinded that request. PSTA CEO Brad Miller agreed with a board decision during a special meeting Monday to meet with HART once more before ...